Extraits

A propos du titre The gate

“You’re gonna eventually float up to the surface and become light and fluffy. This song is a documentation of that. It’s about almost like a metaphysical thing, where the wound of heartbreak – where you heart gets broken and your chest implodes – when that oval shape restores. It becomes a gate. And then you maybe discover, even more so than before, that it was there all along. It’s like a gate : when you’re next to people you love, you exchange energy.”

A propos du nom de l’album : Utopia

“I have had a thousand name suggestions, and I think it’s going to be called Utopia. I can’t think of anything better. Well if I change my mind five minutes before the LP cover goes into print — that might happen”

“I kind of like the fact that it’s a cliche, that word, and I like the fact that it has a fascistic, weird, ‘I want the world to be like this’ feeling about it. It’s a proposal of how we can live in the future with nature and technology in the most optimistic way possible. We have Trump, we have Brexit, we have our issues in Iceland, we have our environmental issues – if there was ever an urgency or necessity to come up with another utopian model, how we’re gonna live our lives, I think it’s now. And this is my proposal.”

A propos du nouvel l’album

“The last album, we sort of call it ‘hell’ — it was like divorce. So we are doing paradise now. Utopia,”

“I arranged flute, I started a 12-piece Icelandic flute section and spent a few months recording and rehearsing with them. I’m kind of taking the flute, the instrument I learned as a child, and putting that into everything. The whole album is a little bit about air, because we decided to have synths that have a lot of air in them, and we have flutes that sound synthy, so there’s that sort of crossover there.”

A propos de la vidéo The gate

“The wound was going through that whole album, especially in the video for ‘Family’, to come through that with Andy in the visual world – we’d almost gone into short speech describing that he’d be the one directing this video, where it (the wound) heals. You get healthy currents and energies back and learn how to love in a healthy way again.”

A propos d’Arca

“I obviously saw a gigantic musician in him, I felt that he’d gone into my world with such elegance and dignity… that I wanted to meet on a more equal basis. It’s my album for sure, and he makes his albums and has his name on it – but as a pure musician, we decided to enter this other world, this other island, which is this sort of Arca-Björk overlap. Where we keep our joy is very similar, and where we keep our darkness is not that dissimilar.”

A propos de ses collaborations

“I’m just a very impulsive person, I really act on hunches. My relationship with Andy Huang is very different to my relationship with James Merry. It was about dropping the egos – if somebody wanted to make a poster for a poetry book, we’d all do it together. I did that for 10 years, so when I moved to London and met you guys, I had that. I spent a lot of my time on my own arranging music, walking outside, making the melodies. That’s a separate side to me that I don’t really talk about (that much) – the solitary or lonely hours that Björk does at a computer.”